


All the Signs

by lonelytylenol



Category: Bron | Broen | The Bridge
Genre: Depression, Drug Addiction, F/M, Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-06-08 04:24:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15235263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelytylenol/pseuds/lonelytylenol
Summary: Even when everything is terrible, Henrik is good at making coffee and plans.Eight stories about Henrik and Saga.Spoilers through the end of season 4.





	1. Exordium

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"An Introduction is faulty if it can be applied as well to a number of causes; that is called a banal Introduction."_
> 
> Henrik has gotten good at not-dying, and it's fine for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during 2x06, but with spoilers through season 4. Please don't judge me too hard for my leaps of continuity.
> 
> Content warning: canonical drug use and mental health issues

The thing with Tommy was bad, Henrik thought, pulling into the office. Stupid bureaucracy. Stupid reporter hack. Tommy was actually a nice guy, too, although there was something about him, with the nervousness and the fear, that made Henrik not want to be around him. Still, it would be pretty fucked if anything happened to him, and now that the story was in print, it was only a matter of time. They needed to get him out like  _now_. 

It wasn't even 9 o'clock, but Henrik felt the energy slipping out of him. He already had five Adderalls in a baggie in his inside coat pocket, anticipating the terribleness of today, and he wondered if he could take one right then, parked in front of the station, without anyone noticing. He looked around — just civilians — but still, he was too sober today to take the risk. Okay, he thought, coffee, bathroom, and then the rest of the day. He put a jog in his step as he approached the door, felt the slow-motion thudding of his heart: a shitty reminder that life went on, that he was still failing his family with every bleakly dark day. So yeah, no, he did not enjoy these moments of almost-sober solitude. But then, down the street, his eye caught something funny: a well-preserved Porsche from the 1970s, with Swedish plates. At least someone was enjoying life.

Annoyingly, the coffee was gone, so Henrik put on another pot to brew, and made a beeline to the bathroom. He needed to talk to Lillian, but saw that Martin Rohde was in her office, with a blond woman he didn't recognize. Alone in the bathroom, he took two pills, and splashed cold water on his face. He'd thought Martin was working on a case in Sweden. There'd been a story on the news about it last night, a boat dredged up with a bunch of skeletons on board. Ahh, which was maybe why the Swedish Porsche was outside. 

Henrik liked Martin — they'd been really close a few years back — but he'd steered clear of him since last year. Their lives were too similar now, and also, Martin was one of those guys who wanted to talk about _real things_ , which did not seem like an appealing idea to Henrik.

In truth, he'd steered clear of just about everyone for the past year, since the investigation into Alice and the girls' disappearance came back saying it was most likely she'd left the country on her own accord, and taken the girls. No sign of foul play. He knew he was delusional, but he had trouble believing he was such a terrible husband that she'd actually  _fled_  from him. But it would be a bad look for him to appeal: it wouldn't get the case reopened, and no one would want to work with him. And yeah, a part of him really _wanted_ to believe that he'd been an awful husband, and that Alice and the girls were living a happy and quiet life in Nova Scotia or Baja Sur. So he kept his head down, kept listening for new leads, and self-medicated by distracting himself with the misfortunes and miseries of other sad bastards. Basically, he'd gotten good at not dying, which seemed like a fine plan for the time being.

When Henrik emerged from the men's room to retrieve his coffee and hunker down at his desk, Martin was helping himself to a mug full. He saw Henrik.

"You made this, right? You always make it strong," said Martin. He handed Henrik an empty cup.

Henrik made a face that he hoped passed as a friendly smile as he poured the coffee. "How's Sweden? I see they've given you a new ride?"

Martin smiled and laughed. "Belongs to the Swedish partner. She doesn't let me drive it."

"Smart." Then, he remembered something: "Hey, how's your kid doing? Is he okay?"

Martin's eyes got big. "Yeah. Actually—" He looked around the room, and leaned in to Henrik. "This crazy thing happened. It turns out that our nanny was, I don't know how to explain this, making him sick. Poisoning him. Some kind of mental illness."

"Munchausen by Proxy?"

Incongruously, Martin chuckled. "Of course _you_ know what that is."

"Jesus. He's okay now? How did you figure it out?"

"Yeah, he's okay. The Swedish partner. I don't know how she does it, but she can see something where it looks like there's nothing. If there were such a thing as ghosts or aliens, she would find those, too. She might actually be part alien. But she's a fucking great investigator."

"Hmm," Henrik said. 

"I mean, don't get me wrong, you're very good at the whole workaholic thing, but I think she might be better at it than you." Martin finished his coffee in one long swig. "Although you're better at making coffee."

Henrik smiled. "What's her name?"

"Saga Norén. Like I said, she's a total weirdo, but I love her." Henrik raised his eyebrows.

Martin rolled his eyes. "The way I love my kids. Or you." He clapped a big hand on Henrik's shoulder. "Anyway, how are you? Listen, I know what they said about Alice, but I don't buy it — you guys were great. If you need help working the case, just say the word, okay? Maybe I could ask Saga if she would help, too."

The blood beat thickly in Henrik's ears, and felt hot around his eyes. He nodded weakly. It was really nice to hear someone say that — even though he knew Martin was just offering to be nice — but also horrible to have his worst thoughts validated. Meanwhile, Martin did not seem ready to loosen his grip on Henrik's shoulder.

"Or we'll just get a drink some time. It's good to talk things out. Yeah?"

Just then a younger detective — Pernille, Henrik thought her name was, she'd helped him with some surveillance last year — popped her head into the kitchen.

"Martin, we have to go. We might have something on the boat." She nodded politely at Henrik.

Martin's hand clapped one more time on Henrik's shoulder, and then he dropped his mug in the sink. "We'll get that drink, okay?"

"Okay," said Henrik.

And with that, Martin was gone. Henrik took a long drink of his coffee. It  _was_ good. 

The next day, they found Tommy's body. They had no more leads in the Ramberg case, so it got buried. Henrik got a week of leave, and went on a bender. When he came back to work, the case in Sweden was closed, Pernille was dead, and Martin had been arrested. 

And that was how it began.


	2. Electrolytes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It didn't take him long at all to realize they were actually a well-matched team: she had this amazing ability to see the big picture — the patterns, along with seemingly every variable, no matter how unlikely; he was a detail guy._
> 
> Henrik has an altruistic interest in solving his case and bonding with his new partner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for all of season 3. 
> 
> Content warning: canonical suicide attempt(s), drug abuse, and mental health issues (also: dad-jokes about suicide attempts)

Was he being creepy? No. Maybe. Probably. The truth was, he had thought about her, after that conversation with Martin. Saga Norén, the investigator who could find something when there was nothing, who had saved Martin's kid, and then turned him in, who drove a vintage Porsche. In his mind's eye, he could see her across the station, through the window to Lillian's office, in profile. So when he'd heard about Hanna's accident, and realized who she'd been working with, he didn't hesitate to volunteer, not even for long enough to think about why he was doing it.

When he walked into the office, he thought it was a funny coincidence that she was wearing the same outfit he'd seen her wearing before. Later, he realized it wasn't a coincidence. He thought that was pretty charming.

She talked to him like he was an idiot at first, but he could tell it wasn't personal. That was actually charming, too, and so was the look on her face the first few times he figured out something that she'd missed. It didn't take him long at all to realize they were actually a well-matched team: she had this amazing ability to see the big picture — the patterns, along with seemingly every variable, no matter how unlikely; he was a detail guy. They were both good at noticing things that other people didn't, they had a good rhythm together, and she was a satisfyingly fast driver. It had been a while since he'd felt so interested and energized by a case.

It was the case, he told himself, that interested him. And maybe also an altrustic urge to understand his partner, for the sake of team bonding. He told himself this as he drove, following her car across the bridge to her place at 10:30pm. Her apartment reminded him of a studio he'd lived in back when he was in his 20s: a spot where he'd bring girls, read books, and sometimes eat cereal. The bed had been a hard futon on a base he'd built from wooden crates. When he was in that old studio, he had felt content and lonely and free. Like his old studio, her apartment was kind of shitty, but oddly cozy and comforting, he thought, as he lay awake in the streetlight semi-darkness. Her pillows smelled familiar. The clicking of the electric furnace near her window was familiar. And even though this no kissing, no touching thing might have been engineered to keep him at arm's length, it had the opposite effect on him. There was something about having good, uncomplicated sex with this woman who he respected, who really liked fucking, who told him exactly what she wanted, and who didn't want anything except this, something that made him feel closer to her. In the morning, there wasn't any weirdness. It wasn't even awkward when she offered him her toothbrush, or asked him if they should tell people at the office that they'd slept together. He declined both suggestions, but he had to admit that the second one in particular was pretty charming.

Soon it was like they'd been working together for months, instead of days. Since he was a detail guy, he could tell that something was happening with her beneath the surface. He knew lots of cops who threw themselves into their work — he was one — but she was taking it to another level. She probably always did, he thought, but she was used to having Hans there to keep an eye on her. That was obvious to him from the five minutes of interaction between them he'd observed. He worried vaguely that he should be protecting her better, or more, or maybe not sleeping with her, but he ignored those thoughts. Anyway, even if she pushed herself too hard, she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself, or at least coping. And maybe he was grateful that she had a lot on her plate, in a fucked up way: if she hadn't been dealing with her own miseries, she surely would've noticed how quickly he was disabusing himself of the belief that he could quit his six-uppers-a-day habit any time he wanted to. Funny how something can seem perfectly reasonable and true for six years (wasn't it more of a hobby than a habit?), and then turn out to be a complete fantasy.

And suddenly, there was a lot going on: Saga's mother was dead, then Hans was dead, then Saga was being investigated by IA. And just as suddenly, she was in his house every night, sleeping in his bed, using _his_  toothbrush, wearing his missing wife's underwear, staring at him like she was seeing him for the first time.

Who, and what, had he imagined she was, all those times that he pulled up her face in his mind? What had been his plan, when he approached Lillian that day? It was probably true that if anyone could find his family, it was her. But it was also true that she made him feel seen. And that she wore her heart on her sleeve, even though she tried so hard to keep it locked down. And that having her in his house, a living and breathing human but also _her,_  specifically, was a rush he didn't know he had been craving. He couldn't have known or imagined any of this, but it felt so certain and normal that he couldn't imagine _not_  having known, from the first moment he saw her. He couldn't imagine _not_  being the guy who went with Saga Norén to her first funeral. Okay, yes, that was creepy. Probably.

And then, just in case he was starting to think things were about to get easier, Lillian showed up at his house with the news that his missing wife was his dead wife. He couldn't stop his cop brain from deducing that Alice had probably been killed within 48 hours of her disappearance, and his girls had not been, and so they were out there alone. There weren't enough pills in the world to help him process that information, which was how he ended up groggily returning to consciousness in a hospital bed, with Saga standing over him, looking mightily angry. And then she was gone, and the rest of the day was an actual blur of overdose-hangover. His head was pounding, his heart felt like it had been replaced by a water balloon full of lead, and he had no idea how he was going to explain or apologize when he found her. He just knew that he had to find her.

When he did find her, at the railway crossing, it turned out that he didn't need to explain, at least not right at that moment. Some might say the gun she pointed at him suggested otherwise, if not the train she was attempting to jump in front of, but he thought she seemed relieved to see him, or at least relieved to be alive, once the train was gone and the moment had passed. He was relieved, too. He held on to her, breathing in the smell of her hair and feeling his leaden heart beating against her back, until she nudged him off. She rose to her feet, and he stood up too. She turned to look at him. They both stood very still for a moment. Without the adrenaline rush of a few minutes ago, he could feel his whole body throbbing painfully, with a sharpness that made his eyes sting and made him wince.

"Are you okay?" Her voice sounded normal. As unlikely as that seemed, he would take it.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

He didn't have the energy to argue with her about letting him drive them, even though he really wanted to make a joke about how her car would've been there overnight anyway if she had killed herself. He followed her back to her place, and parked his car next to hers. She was waiting for him in the building's entrance, holding open the door.

He sat at her table, feeling terrible, while Saga ordered Thai food and stared meaningfully at the glass of water that she'd put in front of him. When he drank the water, she immediately refilled the glass.

"How do you feel," she asked.

"Like shit," he said. "But I'll be okay."

"Detoxing from narcotics can be difficult, because of the neurological changes caused by long-term chemical dependency."

"Yeah, I know."

"Anti-depressants, rehydration through increased electrolyte intake, and proper nutrition have been shown to positively impact the process."

He tried to suppress his smile. "Did you look this information up before you tried to jump in front of a train, or in the car on the way home?"

"If you want me to help you with your case," she continued, "you have to stop."

He nodded. "I know."

"Good," she said. "Do you want me to give you a hand job? Maybe an orgasm would help relieve some of your physical discomfort."

He didn't try to hide his smile this time. "No thanks," he said.

"A blowjob?" In spite of how intensely awful and sorry for himself he felt, he was so fucking grateful to be sitting here with her. He wanted to reach across the table and kiss her, but he restrained himself.

"I'm a little too tired tonight. But thank you."

She nodded. "You're welcome."

The food arrived. He sat at the table, still dazed, while Saga made plates for them. The food smelled good, but he hadn't consumed anything except IV fluids since the day before, and he had to slow down after a few bites of pad thai. Saga, on the other hand, was scarfing down everything on her plate.

"How do _you_  feel?"

"Fine," she said.

"You _seem_  fine," he said.

She paused, holding her chopsticks, and gave him an eyebrow-raised look. "I'm glad you didn't die," she said.

He let out a breath that was half laugh, half relieved sigh. "Same."

Later, he lay in her bed, eyes closed, listening to her brush her teeth in the kitchenette. He still felt terrible, but less like each of his internal organs was exploding individually. He realized he'd dozed off for a moment when he felt the bed dip down. He opened his eyes. She was sitting next to him, with a glass of water in one hand and two pills in the other.

"It's just aspirin," she said. He propped himself up on an elbow and took the pills, feeling intensely grateful again. She watched him drink the water. Maybe it was too dark to be sure, but her concerned expression looked a little different from her normal concerned expression. He was vaguely aware that she refilled his water glass and left it on the floor by his side of the bed before she climbed into bed herself.

Even later, he woke up to feel her run a hand through his hair, rhythmically scratching circles on his head. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to be awake or asleep, so he stayed still. In the morning, he thought to himself, he would make coffee, and they would start looking for his girls, together, and they would figure everything else out. And then he fell asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This entire chapter was basically inspired by how sweetly Henrik looks at Saga the very first time he introduces himself to her, and by my belief that Saga secretly appreciates his dad-jokes. Also, this chapter unintentionally kind of retcons August Rohde out of existence, so I'm sorry to all the August superfans out there.
> 
> The remaining chapters of this story are draftily complete-ish, so I hope to post more soon!


	3. Extra Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"I was a hero early in the morning / I ain't no hero in the night"_
> 
> Before and during Saga's trial, Henrik tries to understand things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, maybe it's unlikely that Saga would be released on her own recognizance _and_ be allowed to stay in Denmark during her trial, but doesn't the Swedish justice system seem very fair, and is anyone less of a flight risk than Saga?

A few years ago he'd had a colleague whose wife was dying — a nice guy, a few years younger than Henrik. The wife had cancer. It was one of those things where she was so young that nobody noticed the symptoms until it was pretty far along. Stage 4, they called it. The colleague was hopeful that the treatments would be effective at keeping the worst at bay, and she'd be able to live on indefinitely, but it was hard to tell whether he was being cruel to himself with that hope. He brought the wife to work parties sometimes, took her to concerts and plays. She wore a wig. She was still pretty, and if you didn't know about the cancer and hadn't seen her before the chemotherapy started changing her skin and the shape of her cheeks, you might not know she was sick. It was hard to tell how much she was humoring him and how much he was humoring her.

Henrik thought he knew how that guy felt, finally, as the trial got underway. Every day he woke up and pretended that everything was fine: he was just a regular guy, living a regular life, having regular love feelings for a Swedish detective who was being framed for murder.

He didn't love Saga's attorney. Okay, he hated her. Early on, the prosecutor had requested a court-ordered psych evaluation. Saga had explained it to him while he made dinner, perched on a stool, in the calm way she explained all the trial prep that she probably wouldn't be so involved in if she wasn't used to passing cases to _the same_   _prosecutor_ who was now taking her case to court.

"The prosecutor wants to demonstrate that I was having trouble regulating my emotional responses to Hans's abduction and death," she said. She was eating a sliced apple, and kicking her bare toes in little air-circles in front of her.

"That's bad?" He probably could've figured out why if he thought about it, but it had only been a couple weeks of sobriety at that point, and he was still feeling dull and slow around the edges, waiting semi-patiently for his brain chemistry to finish re-regulating itself.

"Yes," she had said. "Yes, because it would be used to falsely suggest a criminal motive. Someone doesn't have criminal motive just because they have trouble regulating their emotional responses, which the judge would likely agree with, anyway. But the defense shouldn't be about disproving criminal motive, it should be about disproving the act itself."

"That makes sense," he had said, since it mostly did. He thought she seemed more interested in proving the prosecutor wrong than in her own defense, but he didn't say that.

"I didn't commit a criminal act."

"Yes, but maybe one of the things that was affecting you was your mother, and you could say so, and the judge would take that into consideration," he had offered.

"I don't think so," she had said. "I would also have to tell them that I've had trouble regulating my emotional responses in other contexts, although I've developed very good compensation strategies."

"Why would you have to tell them that?"

"Because it's the truth. And it might raise questions about my capability as a detective, and I doubt the judge would be sympathetic."

He'd nodded. It was hard to have these conversations, because she would drop these little nuggets like _I sometimes have trouble regulating my emotions_ , but she would quickly change the subject if he seemed too interested in talking about her. It was almost as if she were trying to keep a secret from him, which didn't make sense. He already knew that her brain worked differently than his. He liked her brain a lot.  _A lot._

So Saga had insisted that her attorney challenge the prosecutor's request for the court-ordered psych screening, and the challenge had worked. But every day, there were more things the attorney should've taken care of, and that Saga kept having to do herself. Her energy didn't flag, but he could see the exhaustion in her face. So yeah, he hated Saga's attorney. And although he felt bad thinking it, he didn't think Saga was the best person to be defending herself, either. He wished she had an attorney as amazing as she was as a detective, someone who would really fight for her, and who would tell her, "actually, you _don't_  have to volunteer potentially self-incriminating information _just because_  it's the truth"

It didn't look good for Saga. He knew it, just as much as he knew she was innocent, and just as much as he knew she was bone-deep _innocent_  — as in, still not really clear on how being a good person and doing the right thing hadn't been enough. It was hard for him to understand too, even though he knew the universe is a dark and illogical place where you could spend your whole life trying to free yourself from a toxic family, only to have them fuck you over when you were _so close_  to being happy.

Well, maybe Saga wouldn't see it that way. And there was the other way that he was fooling himself: it wasn't _their_  "happily ever after" that Saga's narcissistic, sociopathic mother was messing with from beyond the grave. It was his. He could imagine all he wanted that if things were different — if it hadn't been for Hans, if it hadn't been for her mother — Saga would have been falling in love with him, instead of gently enduring him. But would she? He pretended she would, ignored the fact that she wasn't, deluded himself into believing that they were just a regular happy couple. It was an easier delusion to pull off than some of his others, even though it was a little bit more challenging in his current state of brain-chemical challenged sobriety. 

Although Saga wouldn't talk about her own brain, she seemed to enjoy talking about his.

"How many times a day do you feel an urge to get high?"

She was kneeling on his floor in front of a neatly-patterned array of piles that he thinks somehow cross-reference Danish webcam girls with a Metro closure on the day that his family disappeared. They were three days into the trial. He'd been sober for 41 days.

He watched her touch the piles, lightly, as if she was reading something with her hands.

"I don't know," he said. "Not really at all. It's been good."

She leaned back when she looked at him, tilting her head. "Do you think you're recovering?"

It was a weird question, coming from her. She didn't like speculation, or opinions, or guessing. But she was looking at him with this real, deep concern, sort of like the look she'd given him on the night of the train tracks.

"I think so," he said.

He had gone to his first NA meeting two days after he'd decided to get sober. For the first five meetings he'd sat quietly in the back, _getting a sense of the rhythm,_  he'd told himself. Then, he'd skipped two days, gone back, and introduced himself.

"I'm Henrik, and I'm an addict."

Since then, he'd been going at least three times a week.

Saga had liked keeping track of the days, unsurprisingly, right from the start. He didn't mind, but he'd gotten annoyed, in spite of himself, when she'd started keeping track of the meetings, too. She'd stopped as soon as he said something, or at least stopped mentioning it. Afterwards, he'd felt bad for saying anything, since it was actually really nice of her to care.

She actually seemed to care a lot. He thought it was probably a helpful distraction for her. She had given him lists of vitamins and foods that he should purchase. She had convinced him to see the on-staff psychiatrist for his department, and coached him to focus on the sleeping pills, since those had been prescribed. You couldn't get written up for getting addicted to a drug that had been prescribed.

The psychiatrist had told him that it was normal to feel depressed when you were weaning yourself off a substance, and she didn't think he needed a new prescription for anything else. She made it sound like it was no harder than cutting back on coffee. This might've had something to do with the fact that he was lying to her (or _omitting_ , as Saga had pragmatically called it), but hey, he was willing to take optimism anywhere he could get it. Hilariously, the psychiatrist had given him a list of vitamins and foods that was almost identical to Saga's. He had shown it to Saga when he got home.

"So, if you decide not to go back to the police, you can either be a lawyer, or a psychiatrist." He had smiled at her, feeling that now-familiar gratefulness to her.

"I didn't _decide_ to leave the police, I was suspended," she had replied, studiously not looking at him. "Did she check your short-term memory?"

"Do you think there's something wrong with my short-term memory?"

"No," she had said. "I doubt I would be able to become a lawyer or a psychiatrist."

"Why not?"

"I just know my limitations."

"Saga," he had said, gently.

When she had looked over at him, he'd gotten the feeling that she wished she could take back what she'd said, and put it away somewhere dark. He hadn't known what to say, so he'd dropped it, but he remembered that look.

And sometimes, she looked at him in a way that he was sure was accidental, just this pure open-eyed stare, almost like she was falling in love, too, and it fed his delusion and made him love her more. And then he would start wanting things, and then reality would come crashing back and he would think, t _his could be it, this could be the end_  — she could be in prison for 20 years starting next week — it was too much to bear.

It happened one morning while they were sitting on his couch, drinking coffee. It was the Saturday after the seventh day of the trial.

"What is it?" He looked up, and she was staring at him. "Are you feeling depressed again?"

"A little," he said. "But it's okay."

"You should be better by now," she said.

"I am. Just having a rough day, I guess."

"Maybe it would help if you went for a run," she offered. "Or, we could have sex." Her eyes lit up at that last suggestion.

He did, and then they did. After they'd both come, she shimmied out from under him like a kid trying to remove an itchy snow-suit.

She looked at him with bright expectation. "Better?"

"Yeah," he said, smiling reassuringly.

He wondered whether she knew that it wasn't the drugs, or lack thereof, that was tugging him down. It was just normal, uninteresting human sadness. Love and loss and all that.

She slid out of bed, pantsless, and came back a moment later drinking a glass of water, carrying a book. She sat back down on her side and started reading. He rolled over toward her, to see the title of her book, but got distracted by her thumb, rhythmically tapping the edge of the page. He tilted his head back so that he could see more of her. She kept reading.

They stayed there for a long time.

The next day was Sunday, and he made an early dinner. She watched him roll out pasta, and gathered her belongings from around his house. She'd done the same thing the Sunday before, but this felt different. It was likely that the trial would be over within the next two days. He knew this because he'd freaked out about it that morning, and texted John, and John had sent him a series of long iMessages briefing him on the trial, and also apologizing for asking him about his family when they'd first met. There had been emojis, and an invitation to get a beer some time. John didn't know about the NA meetings yet.

Saga was quiet while they ate, but she was looking at him.

"So, he said. "What will we do when this is over?" 

She kept looking at him, and for a moment he was worried that she was about to get up and leave.

"I don't think about the future," she said, finally.

"I do," he said.

"It's going to get worse."

"It'll get better, eventually."

"You don't know that."

"No, but if I'm wrong, you can tell me. Okay?"

To his mild surprise, she nodded. He wished he was sure what understanding had just passed between them. But unlike her, he didn't mind speculating. He was cool with speculating. He nodded back, decisively.

"Hey, what day is it today?" He was pretty sure that she knew he knew the answer.

"Day 47," she said, like _even schoolchildren_  knew it.

He caught himself that night, clearing their plates away from the kitchen island and bringing her a glass of water, feeling like this was the beginning of something, something really good, instead of the end.

So yeah, he got how that guy felt, now.


	4. Even When the Sun Comes Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Months pass, and time keeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set in between season 3 and season 4. If you've read this far, there are no new spoilers, and no new content warnings.

One night in July, an older woman in the NA group he'd been going to, who kind of seemed like she might be the leader, asked Henrik to stand up, and gave him a plastic chip. It read, in English, "Six Month Recovery - to thine own self be true."

Henrik had found it unexpectedly easy to say some words, and then afterwards the woman who had given him the chip showed him a catalog, and offered him the opportunity to upgrade the chip to a metal one, for charity. He found it unexpectedly easy to say yes.

It wasn't that maintaining sobriety was easier than subsisting on pills and insomnia. It wasn't — it was actually kind of a lot of work, like training for a 10k or studying for the lieutenants' exam. But being sober definitely felt better than being high, as a sustained state of living. This was a nice discovery.

In the last days of Saga's appeal, when it had become really clear that she was about to go to prison, he hadn't been sure he'd be able to deal with it sober. To say that _she_  wasn't taking it well was an understatement. He could feel her losing it. The last night they spent together, she wouldn't eat, she wouldn't look at him, and she wouldn't let him touch her. She had just wanted to fuck and then be left alone.

He had prepared himself for it, but still, for hours afterwards, he had replayed it in his head, feeling gutted. He kept imagining what would have happened if he'd grabbed her arms and held her down, or grabbed her face and forced her to look at him, forced his mouth against hers, or said something "meaningful" that wouldn't have changed anything. Would she have hit him? Or just left faster? He was ashamed of himself for even thinking those things, for wanting her to be something she wasn't, for wanting anything at all. And he had let the shame wash over him, spiraling downward, feeling it all.

But then the next day, when she was gone, he had pulled himself out of bed, looked at himself in the mirror, made breakfast, weeded his back garden before work, and gone to a meeting after work.

He wasn't sure he believed the NA party line that it was his addiction talking to him about how terrible everything was. He thought it was probably just him. But he'd gotten pretty good at talking to himself over the past six or so years, so he convinced himself to change his mind.

During all those years since his family had disappeared, he had told himself couldn't give up, because if he moved, or killed himself, or stopped looking, and then some day they came back, or needed him, he'd be letting them down all over again. But it was really fucking hard, and it felt pointless and abstract a lot of the time. Once, he'd gone to a support group for parents who had lost their kids, but he'd felt like a poser amidst these parents of rape and kidnapping victims who'd had to identify their kids bodies, or who'd survived violence themselves. Talking about it to "normal" people was even worse, because their sympathy was almost always a front for their desire to have him say something that would convince them that nothing like this could ever happen to them. So, over the years, he'd resigned himself to feeling the thing he felt about Alice and his girls totally alone. When he'd told Saga about it, and she'd just let it be what it was, it was like something inside him shifted, and made space for her to be there with him. And it turned out that in a different way — a less sweet and personal way — NA opened up that space, too. In NA, it was okay to have lots of weird shit.

He'd thought it would be his undoing when Saga went to prison, but it turned out that not giving up was so much easier when it was about a really-real person, a definitely-alive person, hurting right in front of him and needing him to keep her from sinking. She needed him, and he was going to be there for her no matter what, he told himself. The first time he'd visited her, she wouldn't see him. He'd left a note telling her he'd be back the next week. She'd finally come out to see him the third time he visited. After that, he'd gone every week, on Wednesday, and left her books and magazines and notes, whether she'd see him or not. He never asked her why she'd listed him as her partner, or what it meant to her; he trained himself not to ponder it, himself. Sometimes she just wanted to have sex, and sometimes she wanted to talk.

It took a few weeks for the nice metal six-month token to come in the mail, and by that time he'd gotten roped into being the "coffee volunteer" for his meetings. It was a job that meant exactly what it sounded like. He took the token with him that week when he went to see Saga. She'd been in prison for ten weeks.

"But it's been nearly seven months," she said.

He ordered the one-year token ahead of time, only a little worried he was jinxing himself, so that he had it in hand when he went to visit her on his one-year NA-versary. It didn't matter, because she wouldn't see him that week, but he showed it to her the next week.

"I know," she said. She had gotten into the habit of not looking at him, and she had her eyes fixed on the far corner of the table between them. "It's good. Research shows that the majority of addicts who are able to stay sober for one year won't have a relapse."

He nodded. If they'd been sitting at his dining room table, he might have teased her about how she'd been studying up on him, but sitting with her, the moment felt too tender, and she seemed too vulnerable, to make even a warm-hearted joke. How sad and weird that this was where they were, and how they were. But still, he thought, he wouldn't have wanted to celebrate one year of sobriety with anyone else more.

"Thank you," he said.

She looked up, and met his eyes.

"I wouldn't have been able to do it without you."

"Okay," she said. In that moment, he felt a fierce protectiveness toward her surge, like a wild animal inside him.

The next week, she wasn't there to see him, but she'd left a note for him, with a list of books that she wanted.

It was so fucking stupid that Saga was in prison, wasting her intellect and her goodness, which might have been why he felt irrationally optimistic that her sentence would be overturned. So when John Lundqvist texted him to ask if he could meet, and then told Henrik he was working on putting together an appeal, he wasn't surprised. But he was really happy.

"Just don't tell her anything yet," said John, with his characteristic nervousness. They were at the local near the Copenhagen police station. John was on his way to pick up Julia. It had been fifteen months of sobriety that week, but there was no chip for that.

"I wouldn't," Henrik said with a snort.

John looked surprised. "For some reason, I thought you'd been to see her."

"Oh, I have — I do. I just wouldn't want to get her hopes up."

"How is she?" He had that feeling he remembered from moments when people whose families hadn't disappeared had asked him what it was like to have your entire family disappear. But John was a good guy, a sensitive guy, and he clearly cared about Saga. Maybe there was space for John in Henrik's little feelings bubble.

"To be honest, not good," said Henrik.

John nodded. "It's so fucking stupid that she's in prison," said John.

"Yeah."

The next time John got in touch with him, the new evidence had materialized. Henrik went to talk to Linn, wanting to do something, but she wouldn't let him touch it — she wanted to be sure there were no ethics questions to jeopardize things. When Henrik finally got to tell Saga, it turned out he didn't have to worry about getting her hopes up.

"Nothing will come of it," she said.

"We'll see." He smiled at her, but she was staring at the corner of the table.

He worked his cases, went to meetings, brought her books, and let worry and care carry him through the months. It wasn't long before the retrial was scheduled. He felt optimistic, and ignored the part of him that asked: What if this fragile and amazing thing that they'd had before never comes back, or was never real to begin with? Or what if _she_ never comes back?

When Linn called him to tell him she was being released, and that he could pick her up in an hour, he felt that fierceness surge again. He was still on the phone as he got in his car, on autopilot. He merged into late morning traffic and headed to the autoroute.

"This shouldn't have happened," said Linn. "I'm glad it's over."

_It's not over,_  he wanted to say, but he was sure Linn was shouldering her share of guilt about this, and there was no reason to make her feel worse.

"She's going to be fine," he said instead. After he disconnected, he drove across the sound, thinking about the best way to convince Saga to stay at his place right away. Why wait, right? He didn't think it would be too hard.

Twenty minutes later, driving past Malmo, he was so lost in thought that he almost missed seeing his phone ring again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have several more little sections planned out to complete this story (don't worry, it eventually gets less sad!), but if you're craving more Bron/Broen fic, I will happily take requests!


	5. Eyes Mostly Closed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henrik finds his way through the present-tense past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during episode 4x05. Sort of.

"I don't think you're in love," he says, "because I don't think you're capable of love. You have no idea what it is. Just leave."

There's more that he could say, but also nothing else that he wants to say to her. He wishes he could make her feel the way she's made him feel. _But of course,_ he thinks, _that's impossible. That's the whole problem._ She brushes past him as she goes, and every cell in his body wants to scream.

The department psychiatrist he'd talked to after Alice's body was found had given him a thick pamphlet about trauma. Henrik had thought it was kind of shitty and impersonal that he was being given a pamphlet — as if the psychiatrist didn't want to take the time to explain it to him personally — but later, reading it alone at his desk, he realized that the psychiatrist had made the right call. He didn't want to sit there hearing about how fucked up he was, especially because there was no way it was going to convince him to commit to more therapy. The pamphlet explained that when you experience trauma, you re-experience your past instead of simply remembering it.

Henrik stands in the kitchen.

Alice is wearing a bright yellow round-neck sweater with oversized gray polka dots, indigo blue jeans, and a necklace that she'd gotten for a cousin's wedding, now demoted to everyday wear. Anna has a braid in her hair, and changes the water in the avocado pit she's sprouting on the windowsill. Astrid starts to cry during breakfast, because she thinks Anna's strawberries look nicer than hers. Alice rests her face in her hand, fingers over her mouth, and watches the girls put their shoes on. Henrik kisses her and the girls, each on the top of their head, and goes to take a shower. It's just a normal day.

Sometimes you didn't even get the details right. The necklace Alice had gotten for her cousin's wedding was still in her jewelry box. 

He pulls his wallet out of his pocket.

He's sitting in the hospital waiting room with Astrid, and he gives her the wallet to chew on, since he doesn't have any actual toys for her to play with. After a while, Alice's sister-in-law arrives and takes her back to their place. In the delivery room, Alice is ready to push. She looks at him and says, "I don't remember it being this fast." It is fast. 45 minutes later, the baby is out, and she gets quiet. A machine that had probably been beeping rhythmically the whole time starts beeping faster. The doctor says Alice is hemorrhaging a little, and a nurse hands the baby to Henrik for a moment and then takes her away, as if she's a cigar or a bottle of wine that he's tasting. "Thanks," he says to the nurse. The doctor presses down on Alice's abdomen and says, "you can talk to her, tell her what's going on." Henrik doesn't really know what's going on, since he's been up for at least 26 hours, so he takes Alice's hand and says, "hey, she's out," and Alice opens her eyes and says, "we can call her Astrid." That worries him, obviously, along with the huge-seeming amount of blood. It occurs to him that Alice might die, although the thought seems far away even as it presents itself. The doctor keeps doing the pressing thing for another few minutes, and then Alice says, "ow, ow, fuck," and the doctor says, "okay, I think we've got it." Later, in her room, Alice looks less yellow, and a nurse brings the baby in and gives her back to Henrik. He sees Alice smile at the sight of him holding her. He says, "we can call her Anna." Alice nods. He's not sure how much she remembers about what happened, and they don't talk about it again.

He stands next to Lillian, looking at the hole in the ground where she had been buried. Her body, or whatever is left of it, is gone now. The hole is just a hole, and this doesn't feel real, but he's used to that by now. 

People who had been traumatized were more likely to be re-traumatized, the pamphlet had explained, because they tended to do dangerous things, or hang around dangerous people. Negative coping, it was called. If you were sitting on the sidewalk in front of your house holding a drug dealer who you hardly know while he bled out, chances were that wasn't the first bad thing that had happened to you.

He has to go, he has to do something, so he gets in his car. He feels the stitched seam of his leather steering wheel with the tips of his fingers. He feels his heart beating heavily. _You might even be attracted to the bad situations, and the bad people. And they were attracted to you._

He remembers _Arrievägen Crossing,_  and there's a moment when he gets there and sees her car and actually thinks, _I was right,_  and is incongruously satisfied. When he sees her, he feels like he's floating up and watching the scene from two feet above his head, while he lets the part of him that has gotten good over the years at talking people off a ledge try to talk her off the ledge. He knows that maybe she's about to die. And then the train blasts by, and then he's with her and she's fine, just shaking slightly, although that might be him. She leans against him.

When he gets to the prison there's an ambulance there, outside. The warden meets him at the sign-in desk and tells him what happened. He takes Henrik down the hall, a hall he's never been down before, and stops in front of a room. A cell. It's Saga's cell. On the bed is a tote bag. The warden looks over Henrik's shoulder by accident. Henrik follows his gaze without thinking, and sees the pool of blood on the floor, about six meters away. The pool itself has been interrupted by several sets of footprints, and watercolor-y brush strokes that he realizes must have been made by Saga's hair. The bag on the bed is Saga's. The warden explains that this had only been her cell for a night or two. And then it finally occurs to Henrik that she's in the ambulance outside.

She's sitting next to him in the car. In the distance, up past the ambulances and squad car that have now appeared, he can still see the gore splattered on the bullet-proof glass of the border control booth. If she hadn't been there, would it have been different? Could he have saved Taariq? He conjures up Taariq's face to replace the image of his death, and sees him in the interview room, defiant. He says, "are you going to help me?"

And sometimes also, even if you weren't negatively coping, you might be reminded of the traumatic thing anyway and feel it again. You could just be walking down the street. It could be just an everyday thing, like a sound, a smell, or a gesture. The past was always right there. Present tense.

Saga presses her hands into her abdomen. She's standing a few stairs up from him, in the half darkness. She says, "I got rid of it."

He wonders if she's ever cared about him — like, actively, personally cared. He's probably invented their entire relationship. It's probably just been _this_  the whole time.

He feels profoundly useless.

If he had never met her, never even known that she existed, what would his life be like right now?

He parks outside the police station, and palms the bag of Adderall in his blazer pocket.

In the bathroom, he splashes water on his face. Takes two more pills.

Martin Rohde is there, by the coffee machine. Martin's hand clamps down on his shoulder. The young detective, Pernille something, tells Martin it's time to go. Henrik has to see Lillian about Tommy.

It's an accident that he gets there first, and sees the body by the side of the road. He knows it's Tommy before he gets out of his car, or maybe he doesn't. He stands over Tommy's body and notices that his feet are bruised and crushed. He wonders how that was done. He'll ask forensics, if it ends up being his case. It might go to someone else, since he was so close. All around Tommy there's a dark pool of blood settling into the grass. Or maybe there isn't. It could just be a shadow. Ramberg wouldn't be so sloppy. The case is going to fall apart, and Vibeke is going to blame Lillian.

From his desk he can see the board, and the photos he's arranged. The past is present. And then he gets it: this case is all about Tommy. 

By the time Lillian arrives, he's figured out the Dahlqvist and Thormond connections, cleaned up the evidence of his long night, and put on a pot of coffee. _Fuck the past,_ he thinks.

He looks out the window in the hesitantly grayish-pink winter morning, and sees the broad cold light of the future stretch out ahead of him.

 


	6. I'll Believe in Anything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"Now_ was still so new."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set during 4x08.

It was hard to believe it was over. Henrik felt like a soldier who'd been in combat for so many years that he'd forgotten what it was like to be home, although that metaphor was probably disrespectful to combat veterans or something. In the ambulance, he hadn't been able to stop looking at Astrid.

"Do you know who I am?" he had said. She had nodded.

"What happened to your leg?"

"I got shot," he had said. Astrid had nodded again, and then turned her face and closed her eyes.

Astrid knew who he was, but he wasn't sure what that meant to her, which felt like a strange thing to wonder about his own daughter. She was quiet and reserved. He knew how trauma worked, and that how a victim seemed to be and felt wasn't necessarily how they really were, but it was a lot easier coming to terms with that in an abstract professional sense than it was with his own child.

In his fantasies about finding Anna and Astrid, Henrik had mostly imagined kind of a generic weekend scene, two happy teenage girls reading novels and drinking cocoa on the couch. In the fantasy, of course, Anna was there. And oddly, he realized, he wasn't there himself. Or if he was, he was just watching from across the room. Maybe he'd given a thought to some hugs and fatherly words during the imagined transformative moment of reunion, but he hadn't thought at all about how hard it would be — like, how hard it would be to be them, or to be him, living in this new reality. And he had definitely never imagined that Anna would be gone, although in fairness, he had more or less believed that they were both gone. Basically, nothing that he'd thought about or done over the past 8 years had prepared him for this. Nothing had prepared him for seeing Astrid's eyes, or feeling her shoulders, or waking up in a chair at the hospital and remembering that she was there, in the same room.

It was definitely going to take some time.

So it wasn't that that he hadn't thought about Saga, but that his entire being felt consumed by Astrid's safety, her wellbeing, and her _presence._  Two days later, when he got home after dropping Astrid back off at the hospital for her psych evaluation, and saw Saga's car, it took him a moment to realize that he hadn't been expecting it to be there.

And it wasn't that he was expecting Saga to keep staying with him, or to move in more permanently, it was that he hadn't even considered that question lately, not for the past two days of his reunion with Astrid, and not for the few days before that when he'd been trying as hard as he could to burn her out of his memory.

But here she was, looking the same as always, standing in his bedroom.

It was a little disorienting to hear that she was planning to move out. It hadn't ever really felt like she had moved in. And, in this moment, it didn't really feel like she was going as much as it felt like she was back from somewhere.

A part of him wanted this moment to be better, or more perfect, but the tired and achey part of him that yearned for things to be easy and familiar was just really fucking happy to see her.

He might not have noticed the bruise on her side if he hadn't been so hungry for her, pushing her to the bed and grabbing her, one hand hooked around her ribcage, in a spot that she was normally okay with because it helped them to find the perfect angle. But this time she had taken in a sharp breath, not a good sound. He sat up right away.

"What is it?"

She shook her head and lifted up her shirt to show him.

"It's fine," she said.

He pulled her shirt the rest of the way up over her head, pressed the diffuse purple bruise gently. What the hell had happened?

"The medic looked at it," she breathed, tugging at his arm. "Come on."

The medic? He knew he should ask about it, but whatever had happened didn't seem to be slowing her down, so he decided that later would be okay, nodding automatically. She had that glazed-over, blissed-out look, totally unselfconscious, and he hadn't realized how much he had missed that look. She started touching herself. In her black bra, breathing hard, she was ridiculous and charming and sexy, and he was overwhelmed with tender lust.

"Come on," she said again.

"Okay."

He leaned back down over her, watching her watch him as she touched herself. He put his hand over hers and pressed down so she couldn't move, let it linger there for a self-indulgent moment to hear her sigh, and then took her hand and moved it to his dick. She liked this part, he knew — it was their routine. She guided him inside her and then shifted around a little bit, getting in deeper, legs up around his back. And then she started thrusting from below, always wanting it faster. He held their pace just slow enough to stretch it out, hitching her rhythm with his. He waited for her to come, just barely.

Afterwards, it took him a moment to realize that she was lying there, breathing hard as well and looking at him, not with lust but with something else. It was that look he remembered seeing once in a while, in the weeks and months before she was in prison, the one that made him wonder, masochistically, if she was also falling in love. Back then, imagining that they could build a life together, or believing in anything at all, really, felt like delusional escapism.

Now, it felt... complicated, he realized. _Now_  was still so new. He could still feel the literal and emotional hangover of the past few terrible days. Their awful fight, and the weird and intense days that had led up to it, were hard to think about. Breaking sobriety and hooking up with a stranger were also not the easiest things to come to terms with. Probably there was bound to be an explosion of some kind, sooner or later: in hindsight, it was pretty clear that things had not been okay for either of them. Saga had been through many layers of difficulty, so it made sense that she'd gotten tangled up in some of them. She was much stronger than him, but he had leaned too hard, and not listened to her. It was hard not to get caught under the weight of all his failure.

Yet somehow, here they were. He still wasn't even sure if he was okay now, but to whatever extent he was, or was getting there, he knew it was because of her, and what she had done. But was she okay? As much as he could still feel the righteousness of his own hurt feelings nudging the edges of his consciousness, that felt small and petty now. While he had taken advantage of their misfortune to spiral down, she had rallied, and of course, as usual, the world was a better, safer, happier place because of her. Or at least, he was better, Astrid was safer, and the higher-ups were happier, having solved the case. But really, was she okay?

She was still looking at him, as if she hoped or expected him to say something. So, before he could second-guess himself, he propped himself up on an elbow, leaning closer to her, and did: "I'm sorry for the things I said, the other day. I'm really sorry."

He watched a few expressions move across her face. Some of them were familiar, some might have been new. He wished she would say something. It was funny, in hindsight, that she had picked the one moment he had not wanted to listen to her to talk about her feelings. He could hardly think back on that terrible fight, and he didn't think he could say anything more about it without losing the newness of this moment. Finally, she nodded. "Okay," she said.

He knew that was all he was going to get. For now. That was okay. For now.

"Okay. Do you feel like a coffee?"

"Yes, if you're going to make it," she said. Finally, she looked relieved.

He smiled, and pulled himself out of bed.

Hours later, as he sat alone in the kitchen, he replayed the last minutes of their conversation. "I think we're good," she had said, and he'd felt humbled. Her face had been luminous in the dining room light, her words giving him a little buzz of joy that came with being included in her company, and her view of the world. Maybe there would be no moment of transformation. Maybe instead of a shining final moment, it was something more like a messy process. You're a dad, you're a cop, you're an addict, you're a lover, you're a guy who can look at himself in the mirror and feel alright. You get everyone out the door in the morning and into bed at night, and there's always another day.


End file.
